Chris Field, an ecologist and earth scientist at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution who is co-leading the panel’s next assessment of impacts of climate change — one of the three main reports that are part of its fifth review of climate science, which is scheduled to be published in 2014. He has also been an author on all four assessments of climate science since the panel began its work.

Robert Watson, who was the chairman of the intergovernmental climate panel from 1997 to 2002 and now is the chief scientific adviser to Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

John Christy, director of the Earth Systems Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and an author on the climate panel’s second, third and fourth assessments. He has been critical of past panel practices.

Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at Germany’s GKSS Research Center and University of Hamburg and an author of chapters in the panel’s second and third assessments.

This morning, Field noted several opportunities for improvement, particularly in the way the scientist authors interact with government officials who negotiate the final wording on report summaries, word by word. These meetings, he said, are held in a “pressure cooker environment” that is bound to result in problems.

Watson questioned whether the scattering of flaws in the reports were, in themselves, significant, saying that the problem lay in how the panel’s leadership and administrators reacted to the revelation of problems and resulting criticisms. He said the response was handled “in a totally and absolutely atrocious manner.”

He added that the panel must hew carefully to its mandate to be policy relevant but not policy prescriptive, acknowledging that this can be a tough challenge (he was sometimes accused of ignoring this line himself when he was chairman).

He and Field both suggested changes in practices. I’ll file updates when possible as others speak. Once the panel has summarized the morning’s presentations I’ll post anew. If you have time to listen in, contribute your own thoughts below.

Also on Tuesday, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the panel’s chairman, who was under pressure to step down but chose to ride out the storm, has a commentary on the BBC Web site today embracing skepticism as a vital component of the tussle over emerging scientific concepts:

I would like to start by saying that I am not deaf to those who do not agree with the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. Nor, indeed, to those who do not agree with the findings – or, in some cases, the existence – of the I.P.C.C. Such skepticism is inevitable, and has been the case with every area of new knowledge that has burst into human consciousness.

This is quite a shift from his chiding tone last November when the Indian government endorsed a report questioning the panel’s 2007 conclusions on the retreat of Himalayan glaciers. Pachauri derided the conclusions, which were not peer reviewed, as “schoolboy science,” only to have it revealed soon afterward that the panel’s own conclusions on the glaciers were wrong, and based on the equivalent of scientific hearsay.

What's Next

About

By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.